07.22.10

Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News

Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Today’s news about digital freedom and openness

Free Software/Open Source

• Morevna – An Open Source Anime Project Using Open Source Tools Only

  Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.

• 50 Open Source Replacements for Popular Financial Software

  Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.

  One trend worth noting — a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.

  Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.

• Master file renaming tasks with KRename

  If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.

• Web Browsers

  • Web Browser Grand Prix 2: Running The Linux Circuit

    Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world’s fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we’ll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 3.6.7 and 3.5.11 security updates now available

      Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.

    • Firefox 4.0 (Nightly) Gets A New Download (“Save link as”) / Upload Dialog [Ubuntu]

      The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download (“Save link as”) / upload dialog – in Linux that is, as I didn’t try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I’ve noticed it.

• SaaS

  • Is OpenStack Cloud Computing Rocket Science?

    There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion’s Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.

  • NASA drops Ubuntu’s Koala food for (real) open source

    NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can’t achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn’t entirely open source.

    NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform’s code is open and some isn’t. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project’s founders.

  • NASA and Rackspace part the clouds with open source project

  • Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site

    In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.

• BSD

  • PC-BSD 8.1 Released

    The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5

  • PC-BSD 8.1 ‘Hubble Edition’ released

  • FreeBSD Core Team 2010 Elected

    One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.

  • FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE available

  • Latest Funded Projects

    The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:

    * DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port–this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions

    * resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism

    * userland dtrace

    * BSNMP improvements

    * jail-based virtualization

• Project Releases

  • Lightspark 0.4.2 open source Flash player released

    The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is “designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware”.

• Government

  • Who will trust open source security from the government

    Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Traditional Knowledge: The ITKI and the Dilemmas of Sharing

    It’s an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.

  • Driving UK Research – Is copyright a help or a hindrance?

    We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.

  • Open Source Schools Steering Group

    After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.

  • Open Data

    • Open Data in Agriculture and Why It Matters

      Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.

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